Monday, March 31, 2008

It was a big shock to all of us. He had been sick for about a week. I had noticed that he was drinking more than usual and that he seemed hungry all the time. On the Tuesday before diagnosis he started vomiting. I thought he had just picked up a bug. About 48 hours after this, I was talking on the phone with my mother. I wasn't really concerned about the vomiting, I was concerned though that his outer limbs were turning blue. When we held his arm, it would turn white and take a count of 5 to return to the blue colour. My mother convinced me that I needed to talk to a doctor at least. I phoned the doctor on call and got advise about what to do overnight and told to bring him in the next morning.

The next morning I took him to the doctor. She was very concerned about his limbs being blue and an awful nappy rash he had from the high sugars and frequent urinating. She weighed him, gave me a script for some cream and told me to keep his fluids up and to bring him back the next day. In the 24 hours that followed we gave him lots to drink and when we went back the next morning he had lost over 1 kg in weight. (Around 2 pounds). It was at that point that I knew he had something seriously wrong with him.

That afternoon he was diagnosed and we were flown down to Adelaide with the Royal Flying Doctors.

In the last 7 years, diabetes has had an affect on every aspect of our lives. We need to plan everything for Tom. Before the pump, we had to have him eating at the same time everyday. He had to eat a snack in between meals. We couldn't go anywhere without something to treat a sugar low. We never know when a sugar low is going to happen and sometimes we don't know why they have happened.

I was told when we were in Adelaide, there would be a cure for diabetes in Tom's lifetime. There has been huge leaps made in discovering a cure but many people are looking for a cure in the wrong area.

I would love there to be a cure for Tom and for him to never have to rely on a pump or injections again. I don't want it through immoral means though.

Many people think that diabetes can be cured if more money is put into embryonic stem cell research. I will not support any charity that is putting their money into this type of research no matter who they are.

An embryo is a human being. To get an embryonic stem cell, an egg is fertilized and the nucleus pulled out. This kills the young baby. If scientist were to come up with a cure from an embryonic stem cell, Tom would probably be healthy, but it would be at a cost to another human. No one should die, so that Tom can live life without diabetes.

The world has become so desensitized to what human life is and I am shocked at the amount of people that think an embryo is less than a person that is born. All life is valuable, whether it is an embryo or and old lady sitting in a wheel chair. We all need to care for everyone and give all the same rights (even when they are small and we haven't seen them face to face).

An argument I have heard is there are many frozen embryo's that parents are not going to use. The parents have their two children, don't want anymore so they ask for their frozen embryo's to be defrosted and thrown away. Many people think that these embryos should be used for research since they are going to be thrown away.

This is like saying, all the Jews that the Germans have in concentration camps are going to be killed by them so lets take them and do experiments on them since they are going to die. This would rightly cause an uproar. The same uproar should be happening for our most vulnerable. Babies that cannot defend themselves need us to speak up and against embryonic stem cell research.

I have tried to find out the charities that give money to Embryonic Stem Cell Research. I know that JDRF did support it in the past. I have emailed them and haven't received an answer yet as to whether they still do. I have had trouble finding current details of where JDRF spend their money now.

I have come across this group though that state they don't spend any money on Embryonic Stem Cell research. The group is called Children with Diabetes. You can visit them here

Sunday, March 30, 2008

For those of you that are flying into Australia in July, here is a video to prepare you for what it is like when you land here.

This weekend Daniel had a weekend away with the pilgrims for WYD from our diocese at Pikina. We went over there today for Mass, lunch and a talk for all the pilgrims. Daniel is the only child of ours old enough to travel without a parent but Steve is taking Sam and Madeline too. They are all looking forward to going and I hope it will be a positive experience for them all.

Friday, March 28, 2008

I wasn't going to post a Friday funny this week but yesterday Annelisa fromMy Motherhood sent me the following joke and I thought this was perfect.

Installing New Husband.

Dear Tech Support,

Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slow down in overall system performance --

Particularly in the flower and jewellery applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5 and then installed undesirable programs such as AFL 5.0, The Ashes 3.0, and Golf Clubs 4.1.

Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and Housecleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. I've tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail!

What can I do?

Signed, Desperate

.........................................................

Dear Desperate:

First keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while Husband 1.0 is an Operating System.

Please enter the command: "http: I Thought You Loved Me.HTML" and try to download Tears 6.2 and don't forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update. If that application works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewellery 2.0 and Flowers 3.5.

But remember, overuse of the above application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5,Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1.

Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Snoring Loudly Beta.

Whatever you do,DO NOT install Mother-in-law 1.0 (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources).

Also, do not attempt to reinstall the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

When we first moved here we wanted to get some chickens so that we would have fresh eggs. Steve told a lady that he worked with and she gave us a mother and 4 babies when they hatched around this time last year. from those four babies only one survived. We then bought 5 chickens from a lady in Willmington. The five of them were aged between 1 and 2 (according to the lady we bought them from). These chickens were laying about an egg a day between the 5 of them and we weren't too happy with that. We asked Steve's parents to bring us 5 more from Adelaide so that we could get a good egg supply from them.

So to start of with we had one black chicken, her baby chicken and 5 bantams. (7).

Soon after we got the bantams, one disappeared. I was a bit worried that the dog and cat had killed her but we couldn't see any feather's around anywhere so I just assumed that this chicken had found greener pastures and taken off.

Boy was I wrong. This little chicken (the only one laying eggs from all of them) had taken off to hide because she was sick of us taking her fertile eggs.

About three weeks after she disappeared, Amelia was out in the backyard and came running in the house. She was shouting excitedly and I thought oh no, we have a snake in the back yard. She came in and said to Steve and I, we have baby chicks. I said we cannot have any baby chicks, we don't have a rooster. Steve went out with her anyway and our little chicken that had disappeared was sitting behind a fence with 5 baby chickens.

From those 5, one died so we ended up with two roosters and two chickens.

The two roosters and two baby chickens are now mature. One of the bantam's we had, never laid any eggs and continually sat in her little box. One day she got out and we saw 10 eggs that she was sitting on. We left her and when 4 eggs had hatched she took these babies and left the eggs. Our black chicken got in the box and sat on the eggs. She hatched another three babies. About two weeks after this one chicken came out of our shed with another 6 baby chicks. (we hadn't even noticed that she was in hiding because of all the chickens running around). The last one isn't a very good mother and doesn't really defend her babies the way the other chicken's have so now she only has three babies. I don't think a mother can take care of more than four (well they haven't been able to at our house anyway).

So, from the 5 original bantams we have 3 left. One brown one, one black and white one and one yellow one.

The yellow one had the first 4 babies. She had 2 roosters and 2 chickens. We chopped the head of one rooster to stop the roosters from fighting (and because one attacked Christopher). Fortunately Christopher wasn't too badly hurt but it scared me enough to say off with his head. (from this lot we have 3 chickens and one rooster)

The brown one has 3 yellow chicks. (another 4)

The black and white chicken has 4 baby chicks. (5 all together here)

The black one that the lady Steve works with has one grown chicken and 3 baby chicks. (another 5 here too).

Total chicken's/roosters from our bantams = 18.

We also have 4 Isa brown chickens that Steve's parents bought from Adelaide. Over all we have a total of 22 chickens/roosters.

Maybe we will have a dinner party at our house in 6 months and serve some chicken. Maybe we will keep them all and get lots and lots of eggs. I don't know what we will do but this should help out with our food bill a bit.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Our Easter weekend has been good. We had our friends Di and Mark come to stay for a couple of nights. We did intend to go to the Easter Vigil on Saturday night but circumstances didn't allow so we went to Sunday Mass instead.

We spent a fair bit of time at our foreshore redevelopment this weekend. We went there on Saturday for a bbq, Sunday for a play and again yesterday for afternoon tea. The children went swimming on Saturday but on Sunday they just spent their time playing and building sandcastles. The weather was perfect. It wasn't too hot and we had a nice pleasant breeze coming off the golf.

Today everyone is back to school and we are all feeling very refreshed after our 4 day break.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

We have had a good week this week. Last weekend I was kept pretty busy doing our once a month cook. I have it all done now and won't need to cook main meals for another three weeks. I want to do a bit of baking though over this week and make some pumpkin damper, someHot Cross Buns and some date muffins.

We have our friends Di and Mark coming with their children to stay for Easter. I want to have plenty of healthy snacks so that we don't overload on Chocolate too much. Tom and Amelia will be having quite a few cooking lessons to get all the goodies ready.

The school week went well this week and Tom and Amelia know our routine well now. This week I am going to make more effort to get to week day masses with them. I haven't gone nearly as much as I would have liked over lent.

As well as daily mass this week I am also giving up my computer time and spending more time in prayer. I will miss everyone but it won't be long and blogging will be on a daily basis once again. I will also catch up with all the wonderful blogs out there that I haven't read much over lent due to limiting time on computer. Comments are still welcome but I won't be moderating them till next Saturday.

Growing up horse racing was a hobby of my fathers so often the whole family went to things like Oakbank and The Adelaide Cup.. I cannot recall an Easter that we didn't go down to Oakbank on the Easter Monday. The part my siblings and I looked forward to was going on the sideshows.

So tomorrow we South Aussie's get a day off and I might watch the race on TV if I remember. For the next three weeks we have short weeks. This week we have the Adelaide Cup, next week Good Friday and the following week Easter Monday. The children will have two weeks of school after Easter and then we have two weeks holidays.

Thursday, March 06, 2008

I posted a couple of weeks ago about Melissa and asked for prayers. Tomorrow Melissa is starting chemotherapy. Above is the link to Kathy's site with all the details. Please pray for this young girl and her mother.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Tom is back home and full of energy. The doctor's are mystified. Hopefully this is just a virus that has given him some ketone's and it won't reoccur. Thank you for all your prayers and a special thanks to Easter for posting my request at one came back.

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Tom is back in the hospital with blood ketone's again. He isn't as high as he was three days ago but this is a worry to me. We have no idea what is causing this. Usually when a diabetic has blood ketone's they are either dehydrated or have high bsl's. Tom doesn't have either. Please pray for him and for his doctor's that they can find out what is happening and help us solve this problem.

She has passed on a bouquet of flowers to me. I will think about the blogs I want to pass it onto and do it next weekend.

Our home schooling week was much better last week except for the day that Tom had to go to hospital. Sam stayed home from school to look after Amelia and Christopher while I was at the hospital and Amelia spent most of the day making Easter decorations.

We have got our Religious Ed program called Catholic Mosaic. What a great resource this is. We will be learning about the liturgical year and reading up on all the saints each month. One of the books we got was the Story of the Cross for children. We will do the stations one night a week as a family with this book.

Please pray for a cure for Type One Diabetes

Our sons Tom and Christopher and our daughter Amelia are type one diabetics. We pray everyday for a cure. We do not want one by illicit means though so don't support any organisation that contributes to Embryonic Stem Cell Research. Click on the photo of Tom and Christopher to read about why I am against using Embryonic Stem cells for a cure.

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Australian Catholic Homeschoolers.

Tom's and Christopher's insulin pump

New book: Faith Quilt.

All proceeds from sales of "FAITH QUILT" going to "Casa de Amor Children's Homes in Bolivia" and "Sarah's Covenant Homes in India" Two truly extraordinary organisations that take in the most needy children and give them a place of love and security to call home.

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Help find a cure for type one diabetes

clink on the picture of Denise Faustman to see what work she is doing to find a cure for type one diabetes